Tag: hope

Young people don’t get married. Young people are covered in tattoos. Now that I’m middle-aged, this is the kind of thing it would be tempting to see as evidence that the world is going to the dogs, that we’re facing some sort of terrible moral decline and that the solution is for everyone to buck up and improve their attitude.

I think we are indeed facing a growing cultural crisis, but I’m increasingly of the view that telling young people to buck up wholly misses the point, and that what we are seeing isn’t a deterioration of attitude but an emanation of something more like despair. Two things I’ve read recently prompted this line of thought.

This rather wonderful article from the Institute for Family Studies is worth a read in its own right for a wealth of beautifully phrased observations on marriage. But one paragraph, on the decline of marriage among the young and/or less wealthy, pulled me right up short:

I think the problem that the less wealthy are having [in regards to marriage] is this kind of achievement attitude that we have about marriage—that I can’t get married because I don’t have a stable job; I can’t get married because one of the partners is not employed, and I don’t want to be on the hook for them or a drag on them. I think that the American government, for all that it loves marriage, does not support families very well. The minimum wage here is a joke; people would have to work 25/8 on that to support a family. There’s so little family leave. It’s brutal, especially at the lower end of the wage spectrum. If you don’t work in a knowledge industry, if you’re sort of an hourly employee, it’s incredibly hard to have a family and have children. Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin writes a lot about how the working classes have abandoned marriage partly because it’s an achievement and partly because getting married suggests a plan for the future; it’s an optimistic thing to do. And I think that often people find that they just don’t have enough hope in the future to be able to make that statement…

That is to say, maybe it is not the deliquescing effect of corrupting liberal values that are causing this breakdown in willingness to commit long-term among the young and/or poor. Maybe these demographics are not getting married because they don’t have enough hope for the future to make long-term decisions seem like a good use of energy and resources. Let that sink in. How utterly screwed are we as a society if we’re so inapable of solidarity across generations that anyone young, or less wealthy is sinking into a kind of future-free despair?

according to numerous measures, those with tattoos, especially visible ones, are more short-sighted and impulsive than the non-tattooed. Almost nothing mitigates these results, neither the motive for the tattoo, the time contemplated before getting tattooed nor the time elapsed since the last tattoo. Even the expressed intention to get a(nother) tattoo predicts increased short-sightedness and helps establish the direction of causality between tattoos and short-sightedness.

Conservatives such as Dalrymple write about tattoos as cultural degradation, with the clear inference that what it evidences is a collective moral decline. But if this study is correct, that is only half right: rather, it points to a rise in short-termism. That could be read as moral decline of a sort. After all, an inability to plan for the future is a serious inhibitor if anyone’s ability to think and act socially, or with any of the ability to defer gratification we associate with civilised achievements of all kinds. But could it not also be read as a failure of optimism?

It’s a thought that lands like a ton of bricks in the middle of any temptation I might feel to wag a moralising finger at someone just starting out now on adult life. Maybe each of these tattooed, unmarried, commitment-shy young people is less a weak-chinned scion of all that is good, pissing his or her cultural inheritance up the wall on frivolities, than a despairing soul fallen out the other end of of a cultural moment and stuck in their own personal Weimar Republic with no meaningful event horizon and no desire to do anything but dance, drink, fuck and draw on themselves with Biro. If this is the case, then older generations truly have a duty to try and help in some way. What ‘help’ looks like in that context I am less sure, but it is surely on anyone over 35 or so to consider where hope resides, and what duty we have to ensure it is not, like home ownership or a stable job, simply something that people used to have before we all gave up and danced ourselves to a childless, tattooed death.